Arch Linux USB flash drive - awesome. Then reboot, not awesome

Yea, everything was going along awesome and then, reboot. Yea that. Now I have a machine that boots to Arch Linux but, so what? What happened?! How is it that everything works while I’m working on the Arch Linux USB flash drive to install Arch Linux and then nothing works anymore after reboot other than logging in. If only I could clone the Arch Linux USB flash drive to my hard drive. That’s the Arch Linux I want back!

If you can log in then it seems you’ve got it installed. What do you want to use it for? What’s not working for you anymore? Chances are if it’s not working now, but did on the USB, you needed to install a package that was included in the install media. The base install of arch basically comes with nothing.

Thanks, yes. I’ve looked through more documentation and believe I next need to install, Linux-firmware. I’m missing a lot of drivers especially the network cards. Meanwhile, I think it would be really cool to have a persistent flash drive of Arch Linux to carry around with me and use anywhere I go!

I installed pop-os on a usb stick for that purpose. I originally was going to do that with arch too but then I figured a rolling distro like arch would probably not be the best for what i’m calling my pocket distro. Everytime I would boot into it i would probably need to install a whole lot more updates. For this i figured an LTS version of Pop-os or Ubuntu or stable debian would be better. There’s still probably going to be a bunch of updates when I use it but much less likely to break.

Yes a great point. So carry both. When you want to play, ArchLinux. When you want to play and do some work, popOS. Meanwhile, I know I’m gonna miss these noob days with ArchLinux. But being a rolling distro, I feel it’s gonna noob me for months to come. So here I am ctrl-alt-F1 reading the installation guide and switching ctrl-alt-F6 typing commands [fdisk -l] waiting for them to finish servicing my vehicle.